PRESS TV, Iran
Aug 10 2008
Ergenekon’s case a test of democracy for Turkish society
Sun, 10 Aug 2008 14:21:40 GMT
By Yusuf Fernandez, Press TV, Madrid
On July 25, a Turkish High Criminal Court in Istanbul formally
accepted to indict the underground ultranationalist and secularist
terrorist network known in the Turkish media as Ergenekon.
The indictment accused 86 people – 47 of whom are currently in prison
– of forming or belonging to a terrorist organization or of trying to
provoke an armed rebellion to bring down the government of Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The 2,455-page document also accuses the suspects of possessing arms,
explosives and classified documents. The arrests took place after a
yearlong investigation that began when the police discovered a house
full of ammunition and guns in Istanbul’s Umraniye district in July
2007. According to liberal-left newspaper Taraf, the investigation may
lead to new waves of arrests.
Among the defendants are some high-ranking ex-military officials, such
as retired senior generals Hursit Tolon as well as Sener Eruygur, who
heads the Atatürkist Thought Association (ADD). The objective
of Eruygur’s association is to spread the thought of Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk, the ultra-secularist founder of Turkey. The ADD helped
organize `republican rallies’ ahead of the July elections last year to
protest against an Islamist becoming president of Turkey.
Other members of Ergenekon included civilians, state bureaucrats,
journalists, academics, politicians and even members of organized
crime groups. Members of the judicial system were recruited to give
the network legal immunity. The chairman of the powerful Ankara
Chamber of Trade, Sinan Aygün, and the controversial
ultranationalist lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz, who has filed
countless suits against writers and intellectuals at odds with
Turkey’s official policies, are among the people detained for links to
Ergenekon. This is what the Turkish media has called the `deep state.’
The suspected leaders are now in prison on charges of having attempted
a number of coups and using illegal methods to influence the political
arena.
The founding charter of Ergenekon was propagated by Turkish media
outlets as well. It contains criteria for recruiting agents from among
the `trustworthy’ members of the Armed Forces. `These agents have to
be ruthless people with the ability to perform independently. They
should take orders directly from the commander of Ergenekon and they
should be unknown to higher-level administrators, the organization’s
personnel and its agents.’
The document also claims that the only way to protect a country is to
stop politicians that act counter to `ideologies that violate
principles of a regime in place,’ claiming that the most effective way
to stop such politicians is to `assassinate’ them. The Turkish `deep
state’ has its origins in what is commonly known as `Gladio’
operations. This network was set up during the 1950s and was made up
by indigenous stay-behind forces in NATO countries, which were trained
to conduct insurgent operations in the event of a communist invasion
or takeover.
Turkish Gladio groups were involved in covert operations against
leftist forces in the 1970s, when the clashes between leftist and
rightist groups brought Turkey to the brink of a civil war. They
gathered intelligence and were responsible for many political
assassinations of members and sympathizers of some leftist and Kurdish
organizations in the country.
In the late 1990s, the network changed its target to combat what it
saw as `the anti-secularist policies of the Justice and Development
Party (AKP) government’ and the increasing erosion of Turkey’s
sovereignty as a result of its application for EU membership.
Actually, some secularist forces refuse to accept the fact that the
AKP is one of the most popular political parties both in Turkey and in
the Muslim world. Its ideology combines both progressive and
conservative elements and its economic and democratic achievements
have played a key role in its popularity. In the eyes of the Turkish
people and other people in the region, the AKP represents two very
important things: Firstly, respect for the society’s traditional and
Islamic values, and secondly, a strong desire for change, development
and democracy.
Ultrasecularist parties have lost all the elections to the AKP since
2002 and have also lost their hopes for a short-term electoral defeat
of this party. Therefore, hard-line secularists of Ergenekon have been
seeking other ways to topple the AKP government, and break apart any
Islamist force in the country, put an end to the EU accession process
and set up an authoritarian state.
Several Turkish papers have reported that former General Sener Eruygur
had held plans for an imminent military coup. According to these
reports, the conspirators planned demonstrations in 40 cities. Snipers
would be hired to shoot at demonstrators and murder well-known people
in order to create an atmosphere of terror, thus giving the military a
pretext to intervene and topple the AKP government. Sympathetic
journalists were expected to support the operation.
This operation would have led to the isolation of the country or even
to a civil war as the Turkish public would not have stood silent
against the kind of coup Ergenekon would try to provoke and this could
have led to the lynching of the secularist opposition. AK Party deputy
Avni Dogan believes that if the Ergenekon organization was not
discovered, Turkey would have fallen into anarchy and chaos. `This was
the target of the organization. They planned to create a country of
anarchy and chaos,’ he told the Turkish daily Zaman.
The indictment document points out that Ergenekon cooperated with -and
in many cases had both created and subsequently controlled- some of
the main terrorist organizations in Turkey. The prosecutors accuse
Ergenekon of having ties with the terrorist Kurdistan Workers’ Party
(PKK) and its jailed leader, Abdullah Ocalan. Some experts hope that
the true nature of the Ergenekon-PKK relationship will come to light
in the following months.
The investigation is likely to result in the reopening of cases that
have long been closed. Prosecutors accused Ergenekon of being behind
2006 attacks on Turkey’s administrative court and the pro-secular
Cumhuriyet newspaper allegedly carried out by `Islamists’.
These attacks infuriated secularists and led to demonstrations against
the Erdogan government. Ergenekon was also reportedly behind the
attack on former Human Rights Association (IHD) President Akin Birdal,
who managed to survive. The founder of the ultranationalist Turkish
Revenge Brigade (TIT), the organization that carried out the
assassination attempt against Birdal, is currently in prison as an
Ergenekon suspect.
Other crimes that could have been committed by Ergenekon would be the
assassination of the head of a business conglomerate, Ozdemir Sabanci,
who has reportedly been shot dead by militants of the extreme-left
Revolutionary People’s Liberation Front; the assassination of the
secularist journalist Ugur Mumcu; and that of academic Necip
Hablemitoglu.
The indictment also says Veli Küçük, believed to
be one of the leading members of Ergenekon, threatened Hrant Dink, the
famous Turkish-Armenian journalist, before his murder in 2007, a sign
that the network could also be behind his death.
There are also claims that the Ergenekon gang was planning to kill
some leading members of the Kurdish nationalist Democratic Society
Party (DTP) and even Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk, who has been
subjected to a hate campaign by right-wing media outlets.
The indictment against Ergenekon has produced mixed reactions from the
Turkish political community. For some reformists who support the AKP,
the indictment is a key step towards further democratizing the
country. Former AKP Parliament Speaker Manisa deputy Bülent
Arinç thinks that the ongoing Ergenekon investigation is also
an opportunity for an in-depth analysis of the past 50 years in
Turkey.
The indictment has been hailed by most Turkish media outlets as a
historic event, which may finally reveal the criminal activities of a
secret network with deep roots in the army and the security forces.
The newspaper Sabah, for example, has reported that the indictment is
a turning point for democratization and demilitarization because it
may put an end to military coups. The secularist paper Milliyet is one
of the few newspapers openly critical of the arrests. It has accused
the Erdogan government of trying to achieve political benefits with
their operation.
Most Turks also back the government’s campaign against Ergenekon. They
think that the ongoing investigation has managed to remove the threat
of the `untouchable deep state’ working against Turkish democracy and
stability. According to a poll published by Zaman, 65% of the Turkish
public consider the indictment a necessary measure to save the country
and its political system.
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